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About Steven L. TaylorSteven L. Taylor is Professor and Chair of Political Science at Troy University. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. He is the author of Voting Amid Violence: Electoral Democracy in Colombia and is currently working on a comparative study of the US to 29 other democracies. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging at PoliBlog since 2003.
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You can thank the incompetent and slow Italian criminal justice system for that one. He’s appealing against his seven-year prison sentence, and he can probably drag out the proceedings for so long that he’ll either die or get back into political office (where he has immunity) before he sees the inside of a jail cell.

I can’t remember the details anymore, but sometime back in the 80s someone noted that since the end of WWII, Italy had had more governments than there had been years. I’m sure that things have improved from those days, but we may be on another run for a new record.

@Just ‘nutha’ ig’rant cracker: Remember that Italy didn’t get unified until the last bit of the 19th century. It’s never really gotten over the habit of multiple governances, either in time or in space.

@Just ‘nutha’ ig’rant cracker: I rmember that, but I also remember seeing someone in the 80’s comment that yes, they’d changed governments that often, but it was a revolving door of the same people. Each new government had mostly the same ministers as the previous, so it wasn’t quite the turmoil it sounded like.